famo.us is a 2.5-year-old Silicon Valley startup that claims to have solved the performance challenges of HTML5.

HTML5 Performance

"Performance challenges?" you might ask, but only if you hadn't yet heard the tales of Facebook and LinkedIn turning an about face from HTML5 in favor of native applications. As I blogged about a year ago, HTML5 has had mixed results in the wild, driving many to adopt native or hybrid native/html5 strategies. As I discussed in describing the event where I first encountered famo.us, the classic example of poor HTML5 performance is the scrollview. Quoting Trunal Bhanse of LinkedIn:

I only saw Steve Jobs twice, but he had a huge influence on my life at about 5 points that come to mind. I am very proud that such a person would come from Northern California, and Steve Jobs certainly represents the best you find in humanity. Really, the culture of Steve Jobs and the technologists somewhat like him (Charles Goldfarb, John Warnock, James Gosling, Larry Ellison, etc.) are to me one of the few positive spots when you look at global culture in this day and age: I'm sure there are plenty of common souls around the world, yet not nearly enough. Such people would stay up late envisioning new ways that humans would communicate, persist information, and render media, and their visions are keen enough that they become reality.